Did community development practitioners offer enough relief to neighborhoods affected by U.S. housing crisis?

The first, based on the idea that the residents of distressed neighbourhoods suffer from a lack of social capital, reflects the hypothesis that the activation of positive network ties and the reinstatement of desirable social norms are the keys to economic revitalization. The second; people must more actively engage the private sector and embrace market-led regeneration in order to thrive. The third theory rests on the principle that the condition most troublingly absent from struggling neighbourhoods is a concern with equitable outcomes, as well as lack of influence on the mechanisms of policy-making.

Wolf-Powers proposes that the theories of action motivating neighbourhood regeneration policy were in conflict, and that this conflict constrained practitioners and policy-makers from delivering a greater measure of relief to affected neighbourhoods and households. Wolf-Powers argues that it can be simple for practitioners -- and for the funders and government agencies that support them -- to rationalise away conflict between competing theories of action in community development. But, she says, this conflict needs to be brought to light and debated. More specifically, recognition of place-based deprivation and disinvestment as products of structural injustice (rather than simply of individual or market failures) is a key step toward finding more effective public policies for combating them.